(Bloomberg) -- Hackers posing as a veteran London art dealer tricked a Dutch museum buying a John Constable painting into paying 2.4 million pounds ($3.1 million) into a fraudulent bank account.

Scamming their way into the middle of months of negotiating emails between Simon C. Dickinson Ltd. and Rijksmuseum Twenthe, the imposters persuaded the museum to transfer the funds to a Hong Kong bank account. Now, the Enschede, Netherlands-based museum is suing Dickinson for damages, claiming the dealer had a duty to maintain its cybersecurity.

The dispute in a London court may come down to which side can convince the judge they weren’t hacked. During correspondence between the real dealers and the museum, cybercriminals gained access to one of the party’s systems, monitored the negotiations and at a suitable point sent a number of spoof emails appearing to originate from Dickinson.

The art dealer’s negotiators were looped in to some of the emails between the museum and the hackers but they said and did nothing to correct the impression that the emails came from Dickinson, the museum’s lawyer Gideon Shirazi told a London High Court.

“Silence would give rise to an implied representation,” he said. “By saying nothing, they said everything.”

Constable was a 19th century English landscape artist, most famous for his paintings of Dedham Vale on the border between Essex and Sussex counties. The museum’s director became interested in buying one of his works while at the European Fine Art Fair in the Netherlands in March 2018.

The museum should have taken the basic step of independently confirming that the bank details received in an email were genuine, Dickinson’s lawyer Bobby Friedman told the court. The art dealer didn’t know a fraud was being perpetrated and would have been horrified if it had realized this, he said.

“Instead of accepting the reality of the situation, the museum has reacted by pursuing a series of hopeless claims against SCD, in the hope of pinning the blame for the museum’s mistake on SCD,” he said in written submissions.

Rijksmuseum Twenthe and Dickinson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The museum is currently holding painting and will not return it, despite Dickinson having not been paid, Friedman told the court. It’s preventing the dealer from selling it elsewhere and paying the unnamed owner of the painting, he said.

It is still unknown who was behind the hack and whether the fraudsters infiltrated the museum or the dealer’s email accounts. Both sides claim it was the other who got hacked.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ellen Milligan in London at emilligan11@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Christopher Elser, Joost Akkermans

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